Metaphorisation of terminology in research papers. Corpus analysis of selected terms in microelectronics, telecommunication and computer science (MTCS)

Abstract

Figurative expressions play an important role in scientific prose since they allow for the mental visualisations of the existing notions to enhance the comprehension of new ideas in the mind of the message addressee. Initially, however, terminology was subject to normalisation to facilitate precise exchange of the scientific thought, which later was considered ‘an extremely idealised vision of specialised communication (Faber Benitez 2009: 112)’. As a result, metaphors started to be acknowledged in specialised communication. This study attempts to determine the metaphoric patterns of selected scientific terms used in the fields of microelectronics, telecommunication and computer science by exploring a comparable specialised corpus of 320 research articles in Polish and English (about 923,000 words) of which 103 articles are in Polish and 217 articles are in English. The analysis is to determine whether term variants are equally metaphorical in English and Polish as well as to show whether the pragmatic meanings of metaphorical terms equal the standardised or dictionary definitions.